Crossrail (for the kids at the back) is a £15billion (€17bn / US$24bn) project to build a new east-west heavy railway line under central London-- the grey line on this map, with the huge central stations shown as white circles:
The first image in this post was of Canary Wharf, the station serving the financial district in Docklands, and a pair to Norman Foster's vast (and rather successful) Underground station built over a decade ago as part of the extension of the Jubilee Line.
This station, built in the middle of a disused dock, is seven stories high and mostly, truth be told, consists of retail opportunities rather than station (the tracks are buried underneath the level of the old dock floor):
In most of the rest of the stations, natural light has been incorporated wherever possible -- as here, at Whitechapel:
Crossrail is quite close to the surface here, and the new station makes use of old Victorian brickwork:
The cross-section shows how daylight gets down to the platforms:
Liverpool Street was built as the main terminus of the vast Great Eastern railway company, a huge commuter station with numerous Underground lines. Incorporating Crossrail is a challenge, but the new station entrances are rather restrained:
This modest architecture belies the sheer scale of the new station:
The glass "hood" entrances remind me of Foster's rather good work on the Bilbao Metro:
Possibly the single most important station on the new system will be Farringdon, which is the interchange for the east-west Crossrail and the north-south Thameslink heavy rail lines, as well as having major Underground connections:
A platform-level view shows that dumb platform-edge screens are being constructed on the new system, another example of our insane approach to heath and safety (why have them here and not on every roadside pavement in the country? Far more people are killed on the roads than the railways, yet we spend a fortune on penning-in people on the railways and leave them to their own devices on the streets):
Again, Farringdon shows the emphasis on getting as much natural daylight into the stations as possible:
Let's finish with Tottenham Court Road, the main station serving the West End and Soho:
This vast station -- just under a km in length -- will create a new space in front of Centre Point (currently isolated in the middle of a roundabout) as well as rather striking new "hood" entrances:
These stations seem to have learned the lessons of the Jubilee Line extension, itself a rather good system. On Crossrail the emphasis is all about passenger flows and natural light. It'll be fascinating to see how it turns out (current scheduled opening date: 2018).
2 comments:
Re: the screens, as a Tube commuter I can tell you that anything that prevents some idiot being killed and, thus, clogging up a Tube line for hours is a good one. Roads may kill more people, but there are almost always alternative routes. That's much less true of railways and metros.
Here's a worrying question for you. How much of this good design do you think will survive the present fetish for oversized financial cuts? Is it, hopefully, a case that the components of the designs for stations are so interdependent that you can't simply remove one and hope the whole thing doesn't unravel like a cheap and nasty Christmas jumper from nan?
Keep up the good work!
I like the emphasis on natural light wherever possible, although that means a lot more windows Network Rail are going have to keep clean. Or probably not.
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